lunes, 27 de septiembre de 2010

domingo, 26 de septiembre de 2010

INTERNATIONAL CALL OF KLIMAFORUM10, CANCUNPara version en espanol oprima aqui...We call upon all social movements, autonomous organizations of indigenous people, nomads, peasants and fishermen, workers, women, youth, teachers, students, neighbors, social activists, environmental, ecological and animal rights activists, professionals, pensioners, thinkers, scientists, and citizens in general to participate in the Klimaforum10, to be held in Cancun – Puerto Morelos, Mexico, between the 26th of November and the 11th of December 2010, in parallel to the COP16 hosted by the United Nations.CONTEXTThis year we have witnessed new manifestations of extreme weather conditions, which are clear consequences of the climatic disaster. The floods in Pakistan have killed thousands and have displaced at least 20 million people. In China 3,400 people were killed in only one day and more than 12 million have lost their homes. 17 countries have registered record breaking temperatures. Russia suffered a severe heat wave and fires and recorded its maximum temperature ever. On the 5th of August, a NASA satellite detected a massive section break off the glacier Petermann, off the north coast of Greenland. Mexico has suffered several catastrophic floods throughout 10 states, as well as the severe consequences of hurricane Alex in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. All these symptoms confirm the signs of the growing tendency of extreme weather anomalies.THE KLIMAFORUM10 INITIATIVEFollowing the failure of the official Copenhagen summit, a group of 30 Danish NGOs passed the Klimaforum baton to representatives of Mexican NGOs. The Klimaforum09, involved some 50,000 activists in more than 300 events. The organising committee was established in February and meetings immediately began with Mexican NGOs to work together to create an autonomous environmental summit, free from corporate or governmental intervention in parallel to the United Nations COP16 summit.Klimaforum10 opens a space for all the people, where they can gather, debate on constructive solutions, propose and find consensus towards coordinated international action in the face of the climate crisis. Where governments fail, the people shall prevail.OBJECTIVES

Strengthen the global movement towards climate justice.

Evaluate and influence the decisions made at the COP16.

Facilitate a space for unification, understanding and agreement among grassroots movements and autonomous organizations that are challenged by climate change.

Provide support and visibility to constructive proposals.

Offer a space where solidarity, reciprocity and cooperation can be intensified.

Reduce costs and the environmental impact of spaces, services, and accommodation of its participants.

Inspire new ways to create summits reducing environmental impacts.

THE KLIMAFORUM10 ORGANIZATIONParticipants can host discussions, workshops, round tables, seminars, forums, assemblies, international conferences, meetings and cultural acts, by submitting these activities on our website, or by emailing the KF10 secretariat which will facilitate the scheduling of activities together with the Organizing Committee.The committee proposes the following thematic guidelines:

RESTRUCTURE AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND LIVESTOCK
La Vía Campesina; Elimination of large fish and livestock industries; Relocation towards local production and consumption; Rejection of patenting seeds and forms of life.

REDUCE TRANSPORT AND URBANIZATION
Discourage car use and transport in general; Depave; Diversity in soil use; Neighborhood and cooperative autonomy.

CLIMATE JUSTICE
Recognition of the historical climatic debt; End the plundering of the Global South; Climatic Tribunal; Mother Earth Rights.

ACCELERATING THE TRANSITION
Strengthen networks of ecological communities; Encourage food sovereignty; Halt extraction of fossil fuels and metals; Local autonomy; Equalize wealth and work; Promote cooperatives to support the most vulnerable.

These are a few of the theme proposals; participants can submit additional guiding thematics. Activity requests will be confirmed by email, and program updates will be posted on our website.HOW IS THE KLIMAFORUM10 DIFFERENT?Space for the activities

Environmental-friendly tents will be provided which can host approximately 50 people, with the object to promote increased participation and create a wider range of proposals.

There will be additional bigger spaces for conferences and lectures.

Organizations and institutions, that wish to do so, can reserve spaces for expositions, promotion or other uses in the main field.

The venueAn atmosphere in harmony with nature, a safe and beautiful space, away from the urban and consumer lifestyle, located on the cenotes road to Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, at just 15 minutes from the COP-16 and 30 minutes from Cancún.Global EcoVillageLocated just steps away from the center of activities, a natural habitat where people from different parts of the planet can live and learn in sustainable co-existence during the course of the summit.

Camping space for approximately 2,500 people.

Medical assistance services with dry toilets and low-impact showers.

3 Nutritious vegetarian meals a day.

Access to all activities of Klimaforum10.

For more information and to secure your space, visit our webpage:

Reducing the ecological footprint of the eventMost summits are dependent on the services of hotels, restaurants, taxis and public transport, however in the face of the current paradigm, to us it seems incoherent that a summit that seeks to address environmental issues should conform to the guiding tendencies, especially considering environmental impacts that an event of this magnitude can create. This is why we have been seeking the best solutions at our disposal to reduce our environmental impact.
Amongst them: the capacity to host thousands at walking distance thus preventing unnecessary emissions, activity tents with dynamic ventilation, dry toilets, recycling stations, our no packaging policy, nor corporate advertising nor multinational products, our vegetarian diet.This is only a fraction of what can be done, which is why we ask for everyone's support to make this event achieve its objectives.THE KLIMAFORUM10 COMMITTEEKlimaforum10 has confronted some severe obstacles from the moment it formed his Promotion Committee on the 2nd of February 2010, with the representation of small grassroots organizations in Mexico. It represents an authentic political expression, a defiant voice that seeks to protect the rights of nature and its sentient beings.In September the Klimaforum Mexico A.C. was legally registered with the objective of administrating funds and managing the requirements of the summit. At the same time, the Klimaforum10 Organization Committee was created.WE NEED YOUR COLLABORATION TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN!Klimaforum10 aims to organize a forum with complete political autonomy. For this reason, it is not financed by governments, big companies or corporate NGOs who generally try to impose their hidden agenda. We hope that you, fellow activists, all understand the great economical limitations we face and that you are willing to help us cover the costs of the Klimaforum10 People´s Climate Summit by contributing with an entrance fee of 5 US dollars a day for your visit. In case of any proceeds, these will be transferred to ecological projects, which will be selected by the participants in an open democratic assembly on the 11th of December. The guidelines for this assembly will be debated in the forums during the summit.The stabilization the climate is essential to the survival of all species on earth, it's a matter of intergenerational justice. People of all ages and creeds unite in the demand for effective solutions that will preserve life on the planet.We, the people have the capacity and the necessity to solve these issues with understanding, solidarity and perseverance. We have the possibility to create another world!

For more information on Klimaforum10, updates, volunteering, costs, visas and so on, please check out our website:
www.klimaforum10.net

jueves, 23 de septiembre de 2010

MEXICO CITY, Jun 4 (IPS) - With less than six months before Mexico hosts the next global climate change summit, Mexican environmental organisations hosting the parallel civil society forum are divided on how to carry it out -- which some fear could ultimately weaken their role at the negotiating table.

The differences are centred on the scenario for bringing together non- governmental organisations (NGOs) in Mexico's Caribbean resort city of Cancún, where the 16th Conference of Parties (COP 16) to the United Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held Nov. 29 to Dec. 10.

At the COP 15 summit held in Copenhagen last December, the NGOs organised the Kilmaforum09, and some of the Mexican environmental groups want to repeat that formula, while many others want an approach that better reflects the Mexican and Latin American reality.

The disagreements "arise primarily because of power imbalances," Miguel Valencia, one of the 10 members of the Klimaforum 2010 Mexican organising committee, told IPS.

"The big international NGOs, like Greenpeace and Oxfam, are well connected and tolerate too many things from the governments. They accept programmes and issues in the summit negotiations which are unacceptable to the social movements," he said.

Following the failure of the official Copenhagen summit, a group of 30 Danish NGOs passed the Klimaforum baton to representatives of Mexican NGOs. Last December, the parallel forum, also known as the Peoples' Climate Summit, involved some 50,000 activists in more than 300 events.

The organising committee was established in February and meetings immediately began with Mexican NGOs to work together to create a civil society space for the Cancún summit.

The first major open meeting took place during the Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, Apr. 20-22.

At that event, a group of Latin American NGOs issued a statement saying, "While we respect and value the experience of the Klimaforum, it responds to the European, and more specifically, Danish, context."

"An attempt to transfer or import it to our region would not respect the reality of our struggles, the identity or history of the mobilisations in our hemisphere," argued the NGOs opposed to imitating the Copenhagen civil society forum.

The split among the Mexican NGOs came at a May 12 meeting in Mexico City, when it became impossible to overcome the differences on how to best represent the interests of the people at the Cancún summit.

On one side are the Klimaforum10 organising committee and about 50 Mexican NGOs, and on the other are the Mexican affiliates of big international groups -- including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Oxfam -- and the usual leaders of local environmentalism, such as the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law.

Gustavo Ampugnani, Greenpeace's Latin American policy coordinator, played down the discord.

"They are two spaces that coexist. Perhaps some are more interested in influencing the official negotiations, while others have lost faith in that process," Ampugnani told IPS, referring to organising committee member Valencia's harsh criticism of the role played by the major international environmental groups in the UN-sponsored talks.

The dispute generated concern among some of the European NGOs planning to participate in Cancún. They are hoping the situation can be resolved, and avoid the creation of two opposing forums claiming to represent global civil society -- as was predicted at the divisive May planning meeting.

Members of the Danish organising committee of Klimaforum09 issued an open letter in regards to the space for civil society at the Cancún summit.

"It is our hope that we may learn from Klimaforum09's experiences, mistakes and successes, in a way that contributes to the further strengthening of the grassroots and civil society movements throughout the world, and the further development of the movement of movements, which is so vital if we really want to change the system and save the climate," wrote Mathilde Kaalund- Jørgensen and John Holten-Andersen.

COP 15 ended in failure when the more than 120 participating governments produced only a non-binding agreement. It is hoped that the Cancún summit will reach an accord that provides continuity to the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in 2005 and will expire in 2012.

The Kyoto Protocol requires the 37 industrialised countries that ratified the agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse-effect gases (responsible for global climate change) by at least 5.2 percent, based on 1990 emissions levels.

"The worst that could happen is that the position of civil society in relation to the negotiations comes out weakened and the effort is diluted," a source close to the Mexican NGOs dialogue for COP 16 told IPS.

European funds intended for Klimaforum10 have been frozen, according to the organising committee, which has opted to move forward, regardless of what the other Mexican NGOs decide.

Klimaforum09 cost more than 125 million dollars, provided mostly by the Danish government.

Klimaforum10 organisers asked the Mexican government and the Cancún municipal government to provide the facilities for the events programmed for their civil society meet.

In Valencia's opinion, the fragmentation "weakens the position of civil society" in the larger context of the Cancún summit, where "we'll end up with four or 10 different peoples' summits."

But Greenpeace's Ampugnani countered that "Mexican civil society is diverse, and that should be celebrated. What has occurred is not going to affect civil society's position in relation to the formal negotiations."

The letter from the Danish committee states: "We urge all concerned and radical voices to come together to create a diverse and determined forum for the social, political and ecological movements." (END/2010)

Some people geo-engineering techniques, such as filling the sky with shiny dust to reflect sunlight, could curb such temperature rises without the need to restrict greenhouse gas emissions

In August 1883 the painter Edvard Munch witnessed an unusual blood-red sunset over Oslo. Shaken up by it, he wrote in his diary that he "felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature". The incident inspired him to create his most famous work,The Scream.

The sunset he saw that evening followed the eruption of Krakatoa off the coast of Java. The explosion, one of the most violent in recorded history, sent a massive plume of ash into the stratosphere, turning sunsets red around the globe. The gases emitted also caused the Earth to cool by more than one degree and disrupted weather patterns for several years.

The cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions has been known for some time. A haze forms from the sulphur dioxide spewed into the upper atmosphere reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth. It's estimated that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 — the largest since Krakatoa — cooled the Earth by around 0.5°C for a year or more.

Now, a powerful coalition of forces is quietly constellating around the idea of transforming the Earth's atmosphere by simulating volcanic eruptions to counter the warming effects of carbon pollution. Engineering the planet's climate system is attracting the attention of scientists, scientific societies, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed — nothing less than taking control of Earth's climate system — the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning.

The Royal Society defines geoengineering as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change" and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming in or reflecting more of it out.

Techniques ranging from the intriguing to the wacky have been proposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere, including fertilising the oceans with iron filings to promote the growth of tiny marine plants that absorb carbon dioxide, installing in the ocean a vast number of floating funnels that draw nutrient-rich cold water from the deep to encourage algal blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air, and construction of thousands of 'sodium trees' that extract carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into sodium bicarbonate.

Some of the ideas put forward to block the Sun's heat would be far-fetched even in a science fiction novel. One is to send billions of reflective discs to a point in space known as L1 and located between the Earth and the Sun. Another is to launch hundreds of special unmanned ships that plough the oceans sending up plumes of water vapour that increase cloud cover. Or dark-coloured forests could be converted into light-coloured grasslands that reflect more sunlight.

Enhanced dimming But the option that is taken most seriously is altogether grander in conception and scale. The scheme proposes nothing less than the transformation of the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere so that humans can regulate the temperature of the planet as desired. Like volcanic eruptions, it involves injecting sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere to blanket the Earth with tiny particles that reflect solar radiation.

Various schemes have been proposed, with the most promising being adaptation of high-flying aircraft fitted with extra tanks and nozzles to spray the chemicals. A fleet of 747s could do the job. To have the desired effect we would need the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo eruption every three or four years. The emissions from the eruption in April of Iceland's 'Mount Unpronounceable' were less than a hundredth of those from Pinatubo, so to engineer the climate we'd need the equivalent of one of those every week, every year for decades.

More cautious scientists recognise that attempting to regulate the Earth's climate by enhancing global dimming is fraught with dangers. Most worryingly, the oceans are absorbing around a third of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans, which is raising their acidity, dissolving corals and inhibiting shell-formation by marine organisms. Turning down the dimmer switch may reduce incoming solar radiation but would do nothing to slow ocean acidification. The climate system is hugely complicated and tinkering with it might be akin to introducing cane toads to control sugarcane beetles.

Moral hazards Although ideas for climate engineering have been around for at least twenty years, until recently public discussion has been discouraged by the scientific community. Environmentalists and governments have been reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken resolve to reduce carbon emissions.

Economically it is an extremely attractive substitute because its cost is estimated to be "trivial" compared to those of cutting carbon pollution. While the international community has found it difficult to agree on strong collective measures to reduce carbon emissions, climate engineering is cheap, immediately effective and, most importantly, available to a single nation.

Among the feasible contenders for unilateral intervention, one expert names China, the USA, the European Union, Russia, India, Japan and Australia. Could they agree? It's like seven people living together in a centrally heated house, each with their own thermostat and each with a different ideal temperature. China will be severely affected by warming, but Russia might prefer the globe to be a couple of degrees warmer.

If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in Beijing. Or the government of an Australia crippled by permanent drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires could risk the wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project.

To date, governments have shunned geoengineering for fear of being accused of wanting to avoid their responsibilities with science fiction solutions. The topic is not mentioned in the Stern report and receives only one page in Australia's Garnaut report (see Section 2.4.2). As a sign of its continuing political sensitivity, when in April 2009 it was reported that President Obama's new science adviser John Holdren had said that geoengineering is being vigorously discussed as an emergency option in the White House, he immediately felt the need to issue a "clarification" claiming that he was only expressing his personal views.

Holdren is one of the sharpest minds in the business and would not be entertaining what is now known as 'Plan B'— engineering the planet to head off catastrophic warming — unless he was fairly sure Plan A would fail.

Fiddling with the dimmer switch may prove an almost irresistible political fix for governments. It gets powerful lobbies off their backs, gives the green light to burn more coal, avoids the need to raise petrol taxes, allows unrestrained growth and is no threat to consumer lifestyles.

In short, compared to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering gets everyone off the hook. No government is yet willing to lend official support to geoengineering. However, the pressure is building and the day when the government of a major nation like the United States, Russia or China publicly backs Plan B cannot be far off. Then the floodgates will open.

Even now, beneath the radar, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri Izrael, a Russian scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter on solar radiation reaching the ground. He now plans a full-scale trial.

Strangelove and son Two of the earliest and most aggressive advocates of planetary engineering were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in 2003, was the co-founder and director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, described by US author Jeff Goodell as having a "near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research". Teller is often described as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" and was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound mad scientist prone to Nazi salutes in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film of that name.

Lowell Wood was recruited by Teller to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and became his protégé. For decades Wood was one of the Pentagon's foremost "weaponeers", leading him to be christened "Dr. Evil" by critics. He led the group tasked with developing Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars missile shield that included plans for an array of orbiting X-ray lasers powered by nuclear reactors.

Since 1998 Wood and Teller have been promoting aerosol spraying into the stratosphere as a simple and cheap counter to global warming. Reflecting the dominant opinion of the 1950s, they believe it is humankind's duty to exert supremacy over nature. It is perhaps for this reason that they have long been associated with conservative think tanks that deny the existence of human-induced global warming. Both men have been associated with the Hoover Institution, a centre of climate scepticism partly funded by ExxonMobil, and Wood is listed as an expert with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank that became one of the main centres of climate denial in the 1990s.

It is strange that geoengineering is being promoted enthusiastically by a number of right-wing think tanks that are active in climate denialism. The American Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank also part-funded by ExxonMobil that offered US$10,000 to academics for papers debunking the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has launched a high-profile project to promote geoengineering.

Of course, geoengineering protects their supporters and financiers in the fossil industries because it can be a substitute for carbon reductions and justify delay. But a deeper explanation lies in their beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural world.

Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, while engineering the Earth's climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.

Lowell Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable; it's a matter of time before the 'political elites' wake up to its cheapness and effectiveness. In a statement that could serve as Earth's epitaph, he declared: "We've engineered every other environment we live in—why not the planet?"

Wood is contemptuous of the ability of world leaders to reduce emissions (which he dubs "the bureaucratic suppression of CO2") and of their ability to reach a consensus on trialling geoengineering. He predicts that necessity will overrun popular resistance to the idea of fiddling with the atmosphere.

Faced with this resistance, Wood speculates about getting private funding from a billionaire for an experiment. "As far as I can determine, there is no law that prohibits doing something like this". Wood is right: there is no law against a private individual attempting to take control of the Earth's climate.

Regulating climate regulation This goes to the heart of the push to develop the tools for climatic manipulation. The debate over climate engineering is at present confined largely to a tight-knit group of scientists, some of whom want to keep the public in the dark and fend off regulation of their activities. In his book, How To Cool the Planet, Goodell describes a series of three private dinners in early 2009 that brought together the main players. Convened by two of the leading advocates, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and David Keith of the University of Calgary, they were "a turning point in the evolution of geoengineering as a policy tool".

In March this year a private meeting of leading climate engineers,held in Asilomar, California, aimed to develop guidelines to govern research and testing. The invitees wanted a voluntary code of conduct that would forestall regulation by governments and the international community so that the experts could work unhindered at their task of understanding how to control of the Earth's climate system.

David Keith argues that an international treaty may be unnecessary because the use of solar radiation management could be regulated by unwritten "norms". This is despite his acknowledgement that the threat of unilateral action is very real; any one of a dozen countries could begin it within a few years. Indeed, one wealthy individual could transform the atmosphere and, with enough determination, bring on an ice age.

Perhaps the wealthy individual he has in mind is Bill Gates, who has covertly been funding geoengineering research for three years with advice from Keith and Caldeira. They now oversee Gates' research fund, which has spent some $4.5 million to date, including funding the three private dinners. Keith will not reveal what the money is being spent on, downplaying it as "a little private funding agency". Right—the world's richest man has a little private funding agency devoted to researching ways to manipulate the Earth's climate system. Conspiracy theory anyone?

Gates is also an investor in a firm named Intellectual Ventures that is promoting a scheme called "StratoShield", which would pump sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a 30-kilometre hose held aloft by V-shaped blimps. Intellectual Ventures is run by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and includes Lowell Wood among its associates.

Gates is not the only billionaire lone ranger who wants to save the planet. Richard Branson has set up his own "war room" to do battle with global warming. The battalions he wants to mobilise on "the path to victory" are successful entrepreneurs—like himself—and their weapons are "market driven solutions to climate change", including geoengineering.

The Carbon War Room — where inspirational quotes from Branson are mixed in with those of other titans like Churchill, Roosevelt and Einstein — represents the type of rich man's folly common amongst modern entrepreneurs with a Messiah complex.

The War Room site promotes a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute and published by the centre run by "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg. It argues that the benefits of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs and shows how to set an optimal temperature for the Earth for the next two hundred years.

The authors worry that ethical objections from environmental advocacy groups may block the deployment of solar radiation management, before noting with relief, "in reality, important economies remain largely beyond the influence of environmental advocacy groups." They expect deployment of solar radiation management will be led by nations with weak environmental lobbies—which of course means dictatorships.

Blue-sky dreaming More vivid sunsets like the one Edvard Munch saw in 1883 would be one of the consequences of using sulphate aerosols to engineer the climate; but a more disturbing effect of enhanced dimming would be the permanent whitening of day-time skies. A washed-out sky would become the norm.

If the nations of the world resort to climate engineering, and in doing so relieve pressure to cut carbon emissions, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continued to rise and so would the latent warming that would need suppressing. It would then become impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections into the stratosphere, even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.

It's estimated that, if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the back-up of greenhouse gases could see warming rebound at a rate 10-20 times faster than in the recent past, a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the "termination problem".

Once we start manipulating the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on a program of sulphur injections into the stratosphere. In that case, human beings would never see a blue sky again.